And here you'll find me talking about things I like. This may or may not include photography, videography, or just general technology. It will include whatever random thoughts I'm having at the moment.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

I had 2 videos to create for Global Encounter this summer. The first was a goofy intro video to get the students (hopefully) laughing and in a good mood for the opening service of the week (you can check it out here). The second was a more serious video conveying the overal theme of the week, which is what I'm going to talk about here.

The Plan

Brad Russell (College Pastor at FBCA and one of planners for Global Encounter) wrote up a script for the video. My job was to give it some motion and energy. He showed me a Dan Stevers video to give me an idea of what he was looking for.

The way I went about building this video was basically this:

Find and cut down audio

Determine length of each "slide" or set of words

Throw it in after effects and come up with a transition for each "slide"

This actually worked pretty well, but the end result doesn't really have a lot of continuity.

The effect I used for all of the flying particles is called CC Particle World. I'm relatively new to the effect, but after researching a whole lot about it I've found it to be really powerful for an effect built right into After Effects.

Audio

For this video I actually went through a couple different songs before I landed on a song called Divine Knowledge I found on SoundCloud. The original song is almost two minutes long, so I ended up cutting it down to just over 1 minute.

Closing Notes

I still found it very difficult to work with music and After Effects. I tried to use some strategies from one of Dan Stevers' tutorials but I still found it to be difficult to get that tight audio video connection that I'm used to in Final Cut Pro.

My wife actually came up with the idea of stubbing the whole video out in Final Cut Pro beforehand with just simple text and then using that video as a template in After Effects. I'm excited about trying this one out on my next video, and I might try to make a tutorial on it if it really works for me.

I know it's been a while since I posted here, but that's because I've been really busy this summer. I've worked on a bunch of video's that I'd like to write about here, but I just haven't had the time. I'm currently waiting for a wedding video to render, and figured now would be a good time to get started.

My goal is to build up some reference material for myself if I ever want to look back at how I did something, and also for anybody else out there trying to teach yourself how to create videos.

The Video

One of the things I've been trying to learn better lately is After Effects. Fortunately I've been able to help build a couple sermon series intro video's for my pastor that are pretty much done entirely in AE.

The latest series is called Nehemiah: The Build. It follows the story of Nehemiah as he leads the Jews in rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem. The main goal with this video was to portray bricks, and building material and what not. Here's the finished product.

The Plan

Because of a couple other videos on my plate, I only had about 3 days (after work) to create this video. Due to that restraint, I ended up scrapping my original (and more complicated) plan and decided to just go with dynamic moving text. To keep with the theme, I found a bunch of royalty free stock photographs of different types of bricks and went to work.

Audio

I found the music here on Soundcloud. I would recommend checking out Soundcloud for all your video music needs. In the advanced search options, you can check off that you want music using the creative commons license so that you can use it royalty free. This song endup up being the perfect length, so I didn't even have to cut it down at all.

Closing Notes

Working with music ended up being a much more difficult task than I thought it would be in After Effects. I was pretty rushed and you can tell there are a few transitions that don't go with the music very well.

My other mistake on this video is the animated outlines on the text. I didn't set them correctly on the last two sets of words, so they don't really animate while on screen at all.